2006-10-25 04:00:00 PDT NEW YORK -- It may come as a surprise to you that one of the most powerful and entertaining works of literature to be published this year is a comic book. But it shouldn't. Jeff Yang talks to Gene Yang, creator of "American Born Chinese," the first comic book to be nominated for the greatest honor in American literature.

Gene Yang has had a pretty crazy couple months.

Yang teaches and does database management for a Catholic high school in Oakland. And because his school is in the midst of switching systems, he's spent endless hours coding and testing custom forms, printing out sample reports, and providing ongoing status updates to the administration. "This is the database that handles grading, class schedules, transcripts, progress reports, everything," says Yang. "It all had to be moved over to the new system, so it's a huge amount of work. So the day before grades were due this semester, I and my vice principal ended up pulling an all-nighter."

And that's why he missed the call from Harold Augenbraum, executive director of the National Book Foundation, informing him that his first novel, "American Born Chinese," had been nominated for the 2006 National Book Award. "I never even got the message," says Yang with a laugh. "I found out when my editor called to congratulate me the next day! I was like, 'What!?'"

The National Book Award is the single most prestigious honor in American literature, bestowed annually on one book in each of four categories -- Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, and Young People's Literature -- and "American Born Chinese" was one of just five 2006 books receiving a nod for the last group. The competition will be tight, but Yang's book has every chance of winning ... assuming the judges can resist the allure of safety and convention.

You see, though "American Born Chinese" is touching, hilarious and brilliantly written and structured, it's also a comic book -- the first graphic novel to be nominated for the National Book Award in its more than half a century of existence. Augenbraum's official statement on the 2006 nominations winks at the situation: "This year's selections take risks in their narrative structure, voice and subject matter ... representing new approaches to often difficult topics."

But new approaches are exactly what the publishing industry needs if it wants to survive. What the National Book Foundation is acknowledging with this nomination, albeit a little late, is that younger audiences have grown up with the juxtaposition of words and images by default. That's a minimum expectation provided by the Internet's inherently rich media environment. And because the closest book publishing gets to rich media is the graphic novel, comic books are increasingly seen as the standard-bearers for awakening the love of reading among Millennials. (After all, folks, a certain boy wizard is on the cusp of graduating from high school.)

Comic Party Revolution

Fortunately, the comic book form is more than up to the challenge. "In the '60s, if you were looking for where the creative juices were really flowing, it was clearly music," says Mark Siegel, Yang's editor and the visionary behind First Second Books, the first all-graphic-novel literary imprint. "Music was exploding like wildfire. It couldn't be contained; it was the most exhilarating place to be. And now, comics is where it is. This is where the most exciting artwork and writing in the world is to be found -- not just in America but also in Europe and Asia."

In some ways, this validation of "American Born Chinese" as not just a great comic but also as great literature is a milestone that eclipses even the Pulitzer Prize awarded to the first broadly lauded literary graphic novel, Art Spiegelman's "Maus." That work's honor was seen as a unique occurrence, occasioned by the historic potency of its subject matter (the Holocaust), the exceptional artistic credibility of his small coterie of friends and collaborators and Spiegelman's own celebrity status. To an extent, Maus received the award in spite of, rather than because of, its graphic novel format.

By contrast, "American Born Chinese" has no dramatic narrative backdrop, no tie-ins to the literati world, no boldfaced-name friends. It's a tale of growing up as a Chinese American boy in the mostly white suburbs, about running the adolescent gauntlet of squirmy lust, pathetic self-pity, raging jealousy and black despair and, ultimately, coming to terms with who you are. It's an intimate, personal story -- despite guest appearances by cosmic deities and the legendary Monkey King -- and one with few high-falutin' artistic pretensions.

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Unlike Spiegelman, who eschews even the term "comic" (he pushes the term "comix" instead), Yang delights in the clean simplicity of his artwork and embraces all the usual conventions of the genre (motion lines, thought bubbles, ZIP! BANG! POW! sound effects and so on). "American Born Chinese"'s mainstream success is significant in part simply because it's a comic book that's utterly unashamed of being a comic book, created by an Asian American cartoonist utterly unashamed of being a cartoonist (and, for that matter, of being an Asian American).

And though Yang counts among his pals a remarkable cross-section of the Bay Area indie comics scene, none of them are household names (yet), and, until now, Yang wasn't even the best-known creator within his peer group -- that designation probably belongs to Yang's buddy Derek Kirk Kim, who's won the triple crown of comic-industry honors: the Ignatz, the Eisner and the Harvey.

"Derek was the one I signed first," admits First Second's Mark Siegel. "I'd read his graphic novel 'Same Difference,' and I thought it was absolutely amazing. At the time, we'd just launched -- we hadn't even settled on a name yet -- but I was getting ready to fly to San Francisco to get Derek's name on a contract anyway.

"And, a few weeks before I leave, he sends me this stack of black-and-white photocopies, half-finished stuff, which he says is by a friend of his. 'Make sure you read this,' he says, and I say, 'Sure,' stick it in my in-box and get on with work. A few days later, he calls me and says, 'Have you read 'American Born Chinese'?" And I say, 'No, not yet -- I'll get to it.' A few more days, another call: 'Have you read ....' 'No, Derek. Come on, I'll get to it -- I promise.' So, the day I'm actually flying out to meet him, he calls again, and he says, 'I know you haven't read it, so just bring it with you and read the damn thing on the plane, okay?' And I did. As soon as I got off the plane, I called Derek from the airport, saying, 'We're having dinner tonight, and please bring this guy along with you -- please, please, please!'"

Bubbling Under, Rising Up

Yang had actually been working on "American Born Chinese" for months before Kim's timely intervention brought it to First Second's attention. Its original published form --which should now probably be considered a collector's item -- was as a set of six mini-comics, black-and-white photocopied sheets folded over once and stapled by hand. There's a thriving underground collector's culture for mini-comics, which are mostly sold through social networks or a handful of fan expos. (It was at one of these, San Francisco's Alternative Press Expo, that Kim and Yang met.)

"You do these things as a labor of love," says Yang. "You don't even usually cover your costs. With my first self-published comic, 'Gordon Yamamoto and the King of the Geeks,' I was losing something like a thousand bucks an issue. Toward the end, I said to myself, 'Screw this,' and cut back to printing just 200 copies of each issue, mostly for my friends. A lot of people in the indie comics scene do the same thing, so you end up being each other's primary audience. A couple copies, you sell through conventions and specialty stores, but mostly it's indie artists selling comics to each other."

Looking at "American Born Chinese" now, it's hard to imagine that something so polished and accomplished could have hovered so long beneath the radar. But the fact is, Yang could easily have remained invisible forever, drawing comics in his spare time after school for a close circle of friends -- just like he remembers doing back in fifth grade, "until I got interested in girls, that is," he adds with a laugh.

But here he is, dragged out from the woodwork and into the spotlight, fending off reporters with one hand and printing school transcripts with the other. He doesn't even have any intention of giving up his day job (though he admits he wishes he could "change the ratio" between his time spent teaching, database engineering and making comics). It all makes one wonder how many other Gene Yangs are out there toiling in obscurity, poised to break out.

One hint that Yang is just the tip of the iceberg is the makeup of his circle of Bay Area friends and acquaintances, which includes a surprisingly large number of Asian American indie comics creators, each distinctive and talented in his or her own right: For example, Lark Pien, "American Born Chinese"'s colorist, is the creator of the blissfully surreal "Long Tail Kitty." Her husband, Thien Pham (with whom Yang is collaborating on his next graphic novel, titled "Three Angels"), writes and draws the witty food-review comic "I Like Eating" for the alt-tab East Bay Express.

The fact is, there seems to be a disproportionately large number of really interesting Asian American creators on the indie comics scene in general. Combine that with the myriad artists of note on the capes-'n'-cowls side of the fence (whom I've written about already), and one can only conclude that there must be some underlying reason behind this blossoming of comics creativity in the Asian American community.

It might be because Asian written languages have an inherently graphic element to them -- they're visually rich, iconic and, in some cases, pictographic, consisting of dense clusters of images rendered almost as free-form panels. It might be because in most Asian cultures, words and images have always gone together. As Yang points out, "In traditional Chinese brush paintings, you always have this pairing of image and poetry. A piece of art isn't seen as complete unless you have a juxtaposition of the two."

Whatever the reason, if the graphic novel represents the forward edge of literature, and Asian American creators are at the forward edge of the graphic novel, it's clear that the future should be an interesting one for our community -- not to mention for the publishing industry at large.

"The fact that Gene got this nomination is a signpost of things to come," says First Second's Mark Siegel. "You've got three things going on here: You're seeing a maturation of the graphic novel form led by a legion of strong young talents, you have a generation of readers who've grown up primed for this kind of work because of manga, the Internet and what-have-you, and publishers are finally investing real money behind the graphic novel form. In a year and a half, every major publisher in America that hasn't jumped in already is going to be pouring money into this. You're watching the renaissance of the comic book. You're seeing the 'perfect storm.'"

If that's the case, let it rain, let it rain, let it rain.

PopMail

I realize I didn't talk much about Gene Yang's background or his personal life in this piece, which is all to the good, because one of my Chron colleagues did a nice profile-oriented piece on Monday. (But, hey, guys, stay out of my sandbox! Just kidding -- the more coverage we can get on people like Yang in this publication, the better.)

I also didn't go into details about the book's story. That's because it's so neatly constructed that telling too much blows the wonderful twists that roll out in the book's conclusion. What I'm basically saying is, read it for yourself -- you won't regret it.

One thing I can say is that Yang winds in an interesting revisionist version of the Monkey King legend into the mix. It's true to the spirit of the myth but has a different set of players. I'll leave it to you to sort out the details of what he's doing.

On the topic of the spirit of the Monkey King: During our convo, Yang and I realized that there's kind of a Monkey King mania afoot right now. A musical adaptation of "Journey to the West" was staged as part of the New York Musical Theatre Festival in September of this year. Steven Spielberg was at one point attached to a cinematic adaptation of the legend (different from "The Lost Empire," the made-for-TV Monkey King tale written by David Henry Hwang back in 2001); while that project lingers in development hell, the long-rumored pair-up between Jet Li and Jackie Chan, set for release in 2008, is apparently going to incorporate the Monkey King into its plot. "Plus, the Gorillaz, you know, their next big deal is a pop opera production of the Monkey King featuring Chinese acrobats, that sort of thing," adds Yang. "It's crazy. He's everywhere."

Interestingly, Yang envisions the Monkey King as more than just a classic Chinese character -- he sees him as the patron spirit of Asian America, which is a thought I've had myself. After all, his epic is a tale of a journey westward, and the character of Monkey, plus his quest for identity and wisdom (and, yeah, maybe a little humility), all feel somehow familiar, like a half-remembered childhood song. Plus, the year some people name as the date of the first public usage of the term "Asian American," 1968, was the Year of the Monkey. I know, because that also happens to be the year I was born. (Okay, so I've got some skin in the game here.)

Now, over in the mea culpa department, I want to clarify something I wrote a while back, which -- due to multiple rewrites -- ended up inadvertently upsetting the family of a talented veteran of martial arts cinema. Here's a quote from my August 31, 2006, column, "A Hero Gets the Call":

Ho Chung-tao wouldn't deny his status as a Bruce Lee clone, and Michael Winston in "Three Avengers" is unquestionably as token a white dude as ever tokened. But calling Chin Yuet Sang a "Jackie Chan wannabe" was glib and unfair. Though, in this particular film, he sported a Jackie Chan-style 'do and was tasked with performing eminently Jackie-esque stunts, comic mugging and martial arts pratfalls, that description hardly sums up his long and stalwart career in the Hong Kong movie industry, which includes graduating from Madame Fan Fok-Fa's opera school, directing the films "Hocus Pocus" and "The Spooky Family," and serving as action director on or actor in dozens of other productions.

So, apologies to Chin and his family. If you believe in karma, I guess this pretty much dooms me to someday be called a "Gene Yang wannabe." Hey, I'll cop to that!

And, speaking of genes, for those of you traveling down South in the next few weeks, the illustrious Jodi Long's one-woman show, "Surfing DNA," is going into previews Saturday, Oct. 28 at L.A.'s East West Players and then running Nov. 1-19 at the company's David Henry Hwang Theater. Jodi takes a look at her parents' life in show biz -- both were early vaudeville-circuit vets -- to explore just how much her own stardust dreams are rooted in heredity. It promises to be, like its creator, fun and interesting and witty. (Call 213/625-7000 for tickets, or visit Seatadvisor.com.)

Last but not least, a little announcement: A project that had its roots right here in this column is starting to move toward reality. That project, you may remember, was the idea of an Asian American superhero anthology -- a graphic novel exploring the modern mythology of mutants, marvels and masked mystery men from the Asian American perspective. Well, comics education specialist Keith Chow, indie comics artist Jerry Ma and I have been working on the idea ever since and have come out of stealth (sort of) with a MySpace site, www.myspace.com/secretidentities. Not much up there yet (other than a totally cool cover mockup), but we've gotten some interest from a few publishers and hope to have some announcements soon. But visit the site, give us ideas or contacts (if you're a comics artist or writer or just think the project's interesting) and friend us up -- up, up and away.